Are Your Production Dumps Secure?

When production problems arise, enterprises typically follow these steps to troubleshoot the issue:

1. APM tools alert about production problems.
2. The SRE Engineer captures troubleshooting artifacts (such as thread dump, heap dump, application log, etc.) from the production servers and restarts the servers.
3. The SRE Engineer downloads the captured dumps from the production server to their local machine.
4. The SRE Engineer uploads the dumps to a shared drive.
5. The Developer downloads those dumps from the shared drive to their local machine.
6. The Developer analyzes the dump and fixes the problem.
7. The Developer might share the dump file with a QA Engineer for validating the fix.

Sensitive Data Scattered Across Multiple Locations

Several organizations classify production dumps as confidential information because they often contain sensitive customer data such as SSNs, Credit Card Numbers, VAT, PII Data, etc. However, if you notice in the above scenario, confidential production dumps are stored in multiple locations:

a. Production Server in step #2  b. SRE Engineer’s machine in step #3 c. Shared Drive in step #4 d. Developer’s machine in step #5 e. QA Engineer’s machine in step #7

Unfortunately, these dumps often remain undeleted after analysis, posing a significant security risk. If sensitive data such as SSNs, credit card details, or PII falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to a severe breach of trust. Customers expect enterprises to safeguard their information, and failing to do so can tarnish a company’s reputation, undoing years of effort to build a strong brand. Moreover, the consequences extend beyond reputational damage, often resulting in costly legal liabilities, regulatory fines, and lawsuits, leaving the enterprise to grapple with long-term financial and operational challenges.

How yCrash Solves This Problem

To tackle these challenges, yCrash provides a secure and streamlined solution. With yCrash, raw dumps are securely transmitted from your production servers to a yCrash server running on your premises. During this process, all production dumps are encrypted and archived, ensuring they remain protected at all times. Engineers only have access to analyzed reports, and this access is limited to authenticated and authorized individuals within your organization. Sensitive information in the reports is automatically masked, providing an additional layer of confidentiality.

By addressing these security concerns, yCrash simplifies the troubleshooting process while safeguarding your most sensitive data. Learn more about how yCrash ensures secure troubleshooting: yCrash Security Features